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Illuminating Shakespeare is your way in to exploring different aspects of Shakespeare, whatever your level of interest and expertise. There are resources for everyone from school student to scholar, including specially-commissioned videos, articles, quizzes, infographics, and journal articles made free for this website.

Gary Taylor writes that Shakespeare's plays have always welcomed new collaborators, new venues, and new audiences

Expert Introductions

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Shakespeare's Reading

Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust describes the many different sources Shakespeare drew upon in his work. Highlighting comparison passages, Wells explores Shakespeare’s relationship with the different texts he read throughout his life.

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Shakespeare on Film

Peter Holland, Professor and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame, explores the ways in which Shakespeare's works have been adapted through film – from ‘straight’ versions like Warner Bros.' A Midsummer Night's Dream to daring reconstructions like 10 Things I Hate About You.

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Shakespeare and Women

Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, discusses Shakespeare’s portrayal of the power balance between the sexes, women’s contribution to the Elizabethan stage, and Renaissance ideas about gender. She also considers key speeches by Desdemona and Emilia in Othello.

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Money and Status in Shakespeare

Professor Emma Smith explores the themes of money and status in relation to Shakespeare. Beginning with Shakespeare’s own life – a tale of social mobility – she then looks at how he presents these themes in his plays. Using Twelfth Night and Coriolanus as examples she explores whether Shakespeare approved of social mobility, and poses the question: is he on the side of the rich or the side of the poor?

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Shakespeare and Religion

Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson, Head of Research and Knowledge at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, explores the religious influences in Shakespeare’s work in the context of 16th century England - a time when the Church of England was given an established authority, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, and anti-Catholic laws were introduced.

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Shakespeare and Sexuality

Stanley Wells analyses the references to sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. From his earlier comedies, such as The Two Gentleman of Verona or Much Ado About Nothing, where he is unafraid to play with this topic, to his middle and last texts where he demonstrates a deeper preoccupation with the destructive potential of sexual desire.

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Shakespeare around the globe

Alexa Huang, Professor of English at George Washington University, discusses cultural globalization and the adaptation and translation of Shakespeare on screen and on stage, especially what "global Shakespeare" can teach us about the plays themselves.

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Shakespeare's reputation

Gordon McMullan, Professor of English at King's College London, argues that Shakespeare differed from many of his contemporaries due to his extraordinary facility with language, his shrewd business sense, and particular practical circumstances. Some of his qualities which we value so highly today would not have been evident to the writer himself. In fact "the Shakespeare we know best is one the Germans invented."

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Shakespeare in our time

Professor David Schalkwyk of Queen Mary University of London argues that the most significant developments in Shakespeare today are to be found not in academic work, but in the reimagining of the plays in different cultures around the world.

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Shakespeare and death

Professor Laurie Maguire discusses the theme of death in Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. She considers how Elizabethans encountered death on a daily basis, and how Shakespeare was clearly very familiar with the details of death, and murder.

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Shakespeare and the Supernatural

Michael Dobson explores Shakespeare’s use of ghosts, fairies, witches, and all elements of the supernatural. He proposes that the ways in which we understand them today has been shaped by Shakespeare–from the ghost in Hamlet to the miniature fairy Queen Mab from Romeo and Juliet.

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Shakespeare and Music

Joseph M. Ortiz, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso, explains how music was experienced and understood in Shakespeare’s time, with reference to education, the emerging music publishing industry, conflicting religious views, audiences’ expectations, and music as an instrument of political power.

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Shakespeare and Nature

Charlotte Scott explains how Shakespeare uses the natural world to amplify the emotional and psychological elements of his plays. She examines the use of the forest in As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus, and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

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Shakespeare and Performance

Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe, underlines the importance of seeing Shakespeare as a playwright as well as a poet and writer. She shows how the text itself includes information that directs the actor, and she looks at how the plays work successfully in all sorts of different performance spaces.

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Shakespeare and Race

Ayanna Thompson considers the theme of race in Shakespeare’s plays, the extent to which he would have been aware of Africans, and how he introduced them into his plays. She discusses the current debate amongst black actors about whether or not to play the part of Othello.

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Shakespeare and his collaborators

Gabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University, discusses what we know about Shakespeare’s collaboration with other writers, and why he chose to work this way. Taking the example of Two Noble Kinsman, which includes William Shakespeare and John Fletcher on the title page, he explores how scholarship has evolved over the years allowing for the discovery of more of Shakespeare’s collaborators.